London does not happen to be one of Europe’s well-touted planned cities. Rather, it’s more a collection of different districts (that could even be called villages). The City of London has been continuously inhabited and restricted by people ever since the Roman times. However, the outer areas to the north, south, east, and west of the original ‘square mile’ were developed at different times. This gave rise to certain characteristics such as ‘Greater London’.
New districts continued to join the fold in the subsequent centuries, with the suburbs developing rapidly during the Victorian and Edwardian times. From then on, the 1890s saw the inception of the underground railway which helped accelerate London’s urban spread rapidly. In the twentieth century, as the expansion continued, some of the inner suburbs turned into less desirable areas and were suffering an era of neglect and decline during the mid-century. During the 1920s and 1930s, London’s outwards expansion continued so rapidly that it had to be forcefully stopped with the imposition of the ‘Green Belt’ in the late 1940s.
Unlike most of all the other major European cities, well-to-do Londoners have always found it better to live in individual houses rather than apartments or shared buildings. In fact, the Victorian era London inhabitants would often even call small terraced residences as ‘villas’, even though they knew that the world itself is used for houses down by the countryside. While grand architectural schemes have been a rarity in London’s history, when they have occurred, the design often took precedence over identifying separated residences via entrances. As you can see in the photograph below, paired ionic columns showcase a colonnade at street-level, which at once joins and dominates both quadrant arms. Nash’s colonnade (from John Nash’s Park Crescent) was illusory, with railings, steps, and light-wells preventing its use as an actual place to promenade. The various shared entrances were often not visible until a person came level with them.
With urban spaces always being in short supply, London’s buildings are crammed together and one of the best ways to distinguish from another is by looking at the entrance. Contrasting with Park Crescent, the photograph below shows a building conceived as a unitary design, with the projecting porches setting up a rhythm with their neo-classical detailing to set up and confirm the existence of separate buildings and households.
Furthermore, building houses in square around a central garden worked as a successful design solution in the early Victorian and Georgian periods. The giant structure and character of the buildings, along each side of the square, is relieved by building the houses in a way that sets the houses at the ends forward, or do so in the centre of the terraces, and also by deliberate variations in the detailing and spacing of the windows. Once more, the attention allotted to entrances helps establish unique and individual identity within great numbers.
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